Roger Hood

Research Associate, formerly Professor of Criminology and Fellow of All Souls College, and former Director of the Centre for Criminological Research, All Souls College

Roger Hood obtained his BSc in Sociology from the London School of Economics in 1957; his PhD from Cambridge University in 1963; and DCL from Oxford University in 1999. He was a Research Officer at the LSE from 1961-63, then Lecturer in Social Administration at Durham University, and Assistant Director of Research and Director of Post-Graduate Studies at the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge from 1967-1973 and Fellow of Clare Hall. In 1973 he came to Oxford as the University Reader in Criminology and head of the Penal Research Unit, which became the Centre for Criminological Research in 1976. In 1996 he was given the title of Professor of Criminology.

He has been a member of the Parole Board for England and Wales, of the Judicial Studies Board and of the Departmental Committee to Review the Parole System (1987-88). He has also been consultant to the United Nations on the death penalty and was responsible for the UN Secretary General's reports on the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Quinquennial Surveys of Capital Punishment in 1995, 2000-2001 and 2004-2005. From 1987-89 he was President of the British Society of Criminology. He is a member of the Foreign Secretary's Death Penalty Panel; has taken part in the UK/China Human Rights Dialogues and the UE/China Human Rights Seminars; is consultant on the death penalty to the Great Britain-China Centre; and a Trustee of the Grendon Friends Trust and The Death Penalty Project.

He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia Law School in 1980-82, 1984-90, and since 2005, and Adjunct Professor at City University Hong Kong since 2008, where he teaches an intensive short course on international perspectives on the death penalty. In 1986 he received the Sellin-Glueck Award from the American Society of Criminology for 'Distinguished Contributions to Criminology'; in 1992 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy; and in 1995 was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) 'for services to the study of criminology'; and in 2000 he was appointed an honorary Queen's Counsel. He was sub-Warden of All Souls College from 1994-96, and was College Steward from 1993-2003. From October 2003 to May 2004 he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Hong Kong. In 2003, a Festschrift entitled The Criminological Foundations of Penal Policy (edited by Lucia Zedner and Andrew Ashworth) was published by Oxford University Press to mark his retirement.

His recent research has had three main strands: the death penalty; race and sentencing; and parole. The fourth edition of his book The Death Penalty: a Worldwide Perspective (with Carolyn Hoyle) was published by Oxford University Press in April 2008.